At a high level, measurement teams across Google recognize that differences in conversions reported across platforms cause significant confusion. Google announced that they are simplifying Analytics reporting by updating the Advertising section, bringing all relevant reporting for advertisers and publishers together in one place. These changes will also support the broader shift towards a more tailored behavioural vs. performance measurement experience in the product as introduced by the recent changes here. In other words, Google is aligning how conversions are defined across Google Ads and Analytics to create a simpler and more intuitive experience in the way conversions are measured and reported across the two platforms.
To support the vision of driving conversion consistency between Google Analytics and Google Ads for Google Analytics-powered conversions, the following updates were introduced to GA4 as part of this effort:
A callout that the initial launch will focus on Google Ads and GA4, with a long-term vision of expanding to GMP. For 360 customers with Sub & Roll-up properties, conversion reporting will come online as a fast follow.
In a nutshell, from now on, events that measure actions that are important to the success of your business are now called 'key events.' You can use the behavioural data from your key events to improve the user experience across your websites and apps.
A 'conversion' now refers to an important action that you want to use to measure the performance of your ad campaigns and optimize your bidding strategy. With an aligned definition of 'conversion' across Google Ads and Analytics, you can now, for the first time, view consistent conversion-based performance metrics in both Google Ads and Analytics reports.
At a high level, no action is required to preserve conversion setups with this launch and there will be no impact to bidding. The necessary changes will be made in the backend for existing GA4 users, including those bidding towards GA4 conversions in Google Ads. See below for a breakdown of what this looks like:
Learn more about user-provided data collection.
Google introducing the first version of a new API for Google Marketing Platform users, enabling organizational administrators to:
With this update, organization details are now included in the accounts list in the Admin API, connecting the existing Admin API to the new Google Marketing Platform Admin API.
Learn more about the Google Marketing Platform Admin API.
As previously communicated, starting March 2024, Universal Analytics 360 advertising features (remarketing, conversion export, bidding optimization) will no longer be supported for traffic from the European Economic Area (EEA). Additionally, certain features such as real-time reporting and API, and real-time BigQuery export will no longer be supported on Universal Analytics 360 for all traffic.
Learn more about the deprecated Universal Analytics 360 features.